Horizontal alternatives to vertical lists

Photo by Tzvi Meller

As much as it seems counter-intuitive, teaching new vocabulary in semantic sets (e.g. jobs: doctor, teacher, lawyer etc. or colours: red, blue, yellow etc.) does not facilitate learning. As far back as in the 1990s, research showed that teaching semantically related items is counter-productive. Have these findings been taken on board? Of course not! New vocabulary in elementary level coursebooks is routinely presented in lists of semantically related items.

Semantic sets and interference

In 1993, Thomas Tinkham investigated the effect of learning new words under two conditions. One group received a list of words belonging to the same semantic set while the other was given random, semantically unrelated words. Tinkham revealed that list-learning of unrelated words yielded better results as the second group performed significantly better when they were asked to recalled the target words. A few years later, Rob Waring (1997) replicated the experiment with two groups of Japanese learners of English and confirmed the results. More recently, Erten and Tekin (2008) in their study of 60 Turkish 4th graders, found the same negative effect on recall and learning when new words were grouped according to semantic categories.

The results of these studies are usually interpreted in the light of Interference theory which states that similarity between the items learned at the same time hinders learning and retention. In vocabulary teaching it means that when words learned at the same time are closely related or share common characteristics they will interfere with each other. You have probably observed the phenomenon of learners remembering the words they have learned (or, rather, their forms: how a word is spelled or pronounced) and the meanings but confusing which word goes with each meaning.

However, there are other reasons why learning lists of semantically related words is counter-productive. Presenting words in such lists, related by virtue of their belonging to the same superordinate category (shirt, skirt, trousers - CLOTHES), doesn’t give the learner much information about how the words in a list should be used. The same is true of other paradigmatic (vertical) relationships, such as synonyms and antonyms. (See my post on paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships HERE).

Semantic sets in coursebooks

Despite the above arguments, coursebooks – especially at elementary levels – still organize new vocabulary in semantic lists. What can teachers do to counter-balance the negative effect of semantic clustering? This is the question we tried to answer with two groups of Primary school teachers I’ve been working with this year on an INSET course in vocabulary teaching. We started by brainstorming kinds of vocabulary items that are commonly presented in coursebooks in lists and came up with the following categories:

Transport bus bike taxi train plane van	Colours red blue yellow green black white
Clothes shirt skirt scarf trousers/pants hat	Animals cat dog lion bear elephant
Classroom objects pen pencil ruler eraser	Food pizza pasta hamburger ice-cream

Developing alternatives 

We then looked at how we can teach new vocabulary horizontally instead of presenting vertical lists, i.e. how to teach new words with the words they are likely to go with (co-text) rather than with other words sharing the same superordinate concept. Colours seemed to be an easy category to start with.

Colours

Instead of teaching a list of, say, six colours, it would be more effective to focus on just three at a time and present these alongside the nouns they can go with, i.e. adjective + noun collocations.

Photo by @ij64 via eltpics on Flickr

For example,

blue sky

red dress or flower

black coffee

followed by another three in the following lesson:

green grass

yellow sand

white snow

We felt that white snow perhaps may not have immediate relevance for primary school pupils in a hot Mediterranean country, so white clouds was suggested instead. White clouds can also combine with blue sky (white clouds in the blue sky) providing the learner with immediately useable language for describing, for example, a picture of a landscape. Note also how alliterative patterns in red dress and green grass can serve as mnemonic devices which have been shown to facilitate learning (Boers & Lindstromberg 2005)

Animals

Colours can also combine easily with animals, especially if you use the Brown Bear story.

  

Here, it is advisable not to teach the whole story to children but introduce 3-4 animals (with their colours) at a time.

Brown Bear, Red Bird, Yellow Duck in the first lesson, and then gradually add other colour+animal combinations:

Blue Horse, Green Frog, Purple Cat, White Dog, Black Sheep etc.

Clothes

Clothes was not an easy category to convert into “horizontal” teaching. The following pattern came to mind:

STUDENT NAME is wearing

a shirt a skirt a hat etc

This is clearly a step in the right direction as here we provide also a useful grammatical structure the new words can be slotted in but a semantic list still remains a long list.

Again, an alternative can be combining words for clothes with colours using the items of clothing your students are wearing and presenting them in the same incremental fashion (three at a time) as colours + animals combinations.

Classroom objects

Photo by aClilToClimb 
via eltpics on Flickr

Once again, one possibility is dividing a long list into two and combining the items with colours using the real objects (realia) students happen to have with them. Or adding the following grammar to the list:

Have you got a(n) …  / Do you have a(n) … ?

or – depending on the level of the learner -

Can I use your …?

Can I borrow your …?

Transport

There are many ways these can be extended horizontally, for example:

I always take the bus to school / I go to school by bus

In this video Herbert Puchta teaches new words and provides collocations for them using Total Physical Response (TPR)

Similar action stories can be created with:

get on/off the bus/train/plane
drive a car/van
ride a bike 

Food

This group often has cognates (=words that are the same across languages) such as pizza and hamburger. Some patterns that food items can be taught with are the following:

I eat I have I like

eggs pasta vegetables

for

breakfast lunch dinner supper

These patterns also helps relate names of different foods to meals they are likely to be eaten for, thus creating mental associations between words. For example, eggs for breakfast, pasta for supper

Hania Kryzsewska in her article Chunking for Beginners suggests teaching different food names with countries they come from. By the way, countries are another category which tends to be presented in lists. Hania’s horizontal alternatives would look something like this:

Tea from China

Pizza from Italy

Wine from France

Football from Brazil

Cars from Germany
Kangaroos from Australia

Note that the list contains not only names of food but other unrelated items.

I hope the above suggestions help you add a “horizontal” aspect to your vocabulary teaching. I would like to thank my course participants for their contributions and ideas, and generally being lovely groups to work with. I hope you learned from the course as much as I learned from you!

For more suggestions on alternatives to vertical lists, see Andrew Walkley’s posts The problems of lexical sets and some alternative approaches and Developing Lexical Sets

References

Boers, F., & Lindstromberg, S. (2005). Finding ways to make phrase-learning feasible: The mnemonic effect of alliteration. System, 33(2), 225–238

Erten, İ. H., & Tekin, M. (2008). Effects on vocabulary acquisition of presenting new words in semantic sets versus semantically unrelated sets. System, 36(3), 407–422

Tinkham, T. (1993). The effect of semantic clustering on the learning of second language vocabulary. System, 21(3), 371–380

Waring, R. (1997). The negative effects of learning words in semantic sets: A replication. System, 25(2), 261–274